Waste of Transportation

Transportation waste is the unnecessary movement of parts, double-handling of materials, or shuffling of

inventory to get access to the right components.

What is transportation waste?

 Unnecessary movement of products from production to sale.
 Unnecessary movement of materials or products in the production process.
 Unnecessary movement of tools or equipment in the production process.

What causes transportation waste?

 Poor route planning and distant suppliers or customers.
 Unnecessarily complex material flows or production processes.
 Disorganized workplaces which fail to minimize transit distances or expense.

How do we fix it?

 Moving aspects of production to be localized, possibly as part of increased vertical integration.
 Mapping transport flows in the production process and seeking to streamline and standardize these
patterns.
 Increased digitization or paperwork reduction to decrease movement in business processes.

Waste of Motion

Waste in motion in not the same as Transportation Waste.

Unnecessary Motion is any motion of people or machines that do not add the value to the product or the
Process while Transportation in unnecessary movement of people, products, materials and information.

What is motion waste?

 Excessive movement by workers in the production process.
 The human element of production flows.

What causes motion waste?

 Poorly designed production facilities.
 Non-standardized production processes.
 Unclear flows of materials, down to either poor operational management or poor training.

How do we fix it?

 Assembly lines can minimize worker movements.
 Clear categorization and availability of needed tools or equipment.
 Effective training procedures and easily accessible and actionable standard operating procedures.
Over Processing

A constant search for product perfection can sometimes lead to a product being over-processed. This often
comes from a misunderstanding of why customers buy your product, and what looks better to the product designer
might look worse to the customer if the necessary market research and customer satisfaction data isn’t present.

What is over processing?

 Non-value added processing by labor.
 Non-value added processing by machinery.
 Creating unnecessary quality or depth beyond the customer need.

What causes over processing?

 Unclear understanding of customer product satisfaction.
 Excessive focus on refinements and detail.
 Frequent engineering changes and unclear or poorly documented work instructions.

How do we fix it?

 Value stream analysis, also known as information-flow mapping.
 Waterfall diagrams help companies measure the cumulative effect of sequential variables.
 Streamlining standard operating procedures to reduce overall volume of documentation

Producing Failures

Anyone involved in the manufacturing of physical products knows about the ongoing battle against defects. The
world of Six Sigma is built around the idea that reducing defects is a hugely important route to improving quality. When
operating at scale, small percentage decreases of defective output can result in large financial gains. However, it is not
only industrial and manufacturing sectors which benefit from viewing their business output from the perspective of
defects. In other industries it is possible to identify common defects in output and design a process which highlights the
need for further inspection into these common defects before delivery, or during the task itself.

What is producing failures?

 Wasted processing efforts on defective products.
 Wasted materials on defective products.
 Wasted processing on attempts to rework or repair defective products.

What causes producing failures?

 Poor management of the production processes.
 Inadequate suppliers or third party production elements.
 Unclear specifications and poor manufacturing documentation.

How do we fix it?

 Avoid segmenting quality control departmentally; quality control can benefit from a holistic perspective.
 Use techniques like the DMAIC process and other Six Sigma methodologies to tackle defects.
 Make sure workers are appropriately trained and standardized processes are being adequately followed.